Palm Beach considers Raese expansion today

By BEN SMITH

10/27/2010 09:43 AM EDT

With John Raese running hard in West Virginia, a lesser enterprise of his will be considered tonight by the Town of Palm Beach's Architecture Commission.

Raese, whose lavish Florida home has been a favorite Democratic target, has applied to the board for permission to replace a giant six-foot by eight-foot dollhouse and replace it with a new fourteen-foot by fifteen-foot "glass conservatory."

The application by Raese's wife, Elizabeth, has been a matter of some local controversy since last year, when the Commission turned down a larger version of the project, and a neighbor, Elizabeth Marshall, offered emotional testimony against it at a hearing this August 25 (at 2:34 here), calling the Raeses "abusive" in destroying the "privacy and the intimacy" of her property, and complained both of "retribution" and of having spent $35,000 fighting it.

“This particular ancillary structure can be seen from every single public room of 273 Bahama Lane. While I’m sure the property owners on Jamaica Lane [the Raeses] are pleased with the design and amenity offered to them, it is not something that the townhouse-intimate private view of back patio in each public room of 273 Bahama Lane is necessarily excited to embrace," she said, adding that she has nothing against the Raeses and enjoys hearing their daughters at play.

Commissioners -- whose attention to detail and free exercise of government power will make libertarians shudder -- were unimpressed with the architecture of the planned conservatory. "It looks like a people cage to me," one said at the August hearing. The project was deferred "until they show us proper landscaping."

The Commission, according to its agenda, will reconsider the structure again later this morning.